Blog Archives for Roads

By Bethanie Walder - July 22, 2010   On July 20, the Forest Service released their new Climate Change Roadmap, along with a new “scorecard” that will enable the national office to annually rate how each individual national forest is adapting to and mitigating for climate change.

By Bethanie Walder - June 23, 2010    For the past several years, Wildlands CPR has been posting the Forest Service’s annual Road Accomplishment Reports (RAR).  The RARs show how many miles of roads are maintained, improved, or decommissioned in any given year and on any given forest.  The RARs also show which funds were used to pay for the work.

By Bethanie Walder - June 22, 2010   On June 11, 2010, the US Department of Agriculture released it’s 2010-2015 strategic plan, including it’s overarching plans for the Forest Service.   Forest Service management was basically addressed in the second of the plans four goals: Ensure our national forest and private working lands are conserved, restored, and made more resilient to climate change, while enhancing our water resources.

By Thomas R Petersen - June 16, 2010    The ecological impacts of roads - no matter where they may be, or potentially may be as in this case in the Serengeti - are the same: they split habitat, spread invasive weeds and lead to increased roadkill.  As described in this article by NY Times writer, Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist, the Tanzanian government is considering building a road in the northern Serengeti, right through one of the largest animal migrations on the planet: more than a million wildebeests and hundreds of thou

By Sarah Peters - June 11, 2010    On Saturday, June 5, two road blowouts from plugged culverts closed a popular route on the Custer National Forest outside of Red Lodge, Montana and dumped debris and sediment into the Main Fork of Rock Creek.  The road is closed indefinitely until repairs can be made.   

By Greg Peters - March 24, 2010   

By Bethanie Walder - March 17, 2010    NY Time commentator Olivia Judson posted a terrific piece today, Divide and Diminish, about habitat fragmentation and biodiversity.  While the information isn't necessarily new, her explanations about island biogeography and related processes puts things in good perspective. Here's an excerpt:

By Bethanie Walder - February 26, 2010    Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell spent some time on Capitol Hill this week explaining the Forest Service’s proposed 2011 budget with Congressional appropriators and oversight committees.   The new budget proposes to pool numerous existing line items into one large “Integrated Resource Restoration” (IRR) program.  The idea is that this would enable the agency to move forward more effectively toward all restoration objectives, including watershed restoration.

By Thomas R Petersen - February 26, 2010    Canada's grizzly bears are in the news again, and this time not directly because of the controversial bear hunt, but because of "...massive hunting mortality along B.C.'s highways."

By Greg Peters - February 22, 2010   At the tail end of 2009, two prominent political bodies, the Western Governors Association (WGA) and the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) each sent letters to the USDA extolling watershed restoration, the Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative, and "Right-Sizing" the Forest Road System.